McSweeney’s Brings Design Magic Back to Children’s Books

Allison Arieff:

The folks at McSweeneys’s McMullens (the children’s book department of McSweeney’s Quarterly & Books) totally get that. They realize that a lot of children’s literature is absurd but not in the way it should be. (It’s absurd, for example, that a child should be saddled with the name of Pinkalicious and not in a compelling sort of way.)
As such, it is genius to republish a book of stories from the ’70s written by Eugene Ionesco, one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd. The stories in his Stories 1234 (available on Sept. 12) are silly, filled with sentences (and sauerkraut) and drawings that combine enough beauty, confusion and nonsense to captivate any kid.